Tag Archives: Republicans

Democratic Party Affiliation Grows

See what happens when the GOP declares War on Medicare?

If the Dems will only hold fast in defending Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security while the Republicans continue to try to destroy them, they will become the majority Party for the foreseeable future…..

As long as the economy doesn’t crash…

From Taegen Goddard’s Political Wire:

A new Gallup poll finds 45% of Americans identified as Democrats last month as compared to 39% who identified as Republicans.

The six-point Democratic edge is the largest measured since October 2009, when the gap was seven points.

via Democratic Party Affiliation Grows.

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Dynasty 2012: The Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin Cat Fight

Sounds like they are going to try to play this like a dumber version of “Dynasty” with Palin and Bachmann trying to be dime store versions of Crystal and Alexis….

Linda Evans and Joan Collins, they ain’t…

And smart they ain’t either….

Still, “Dynasty’s” been gone for many years.  I guess it’s time for a pale imitation to emerge as the TV Remake:  “Dynasty 2012”.

Everything else is starting to look like the 1980’s (See Wall Street -the Movie), so why not redo this too?

Isn’t that how the entertainment world works?  Wait a few years then remake good, original ideas into a second rate remake?  Or is that GOP Politics I’m thinking of?

Since Reagan, it’s so hard to separate the two worlds.  But, god knows these two women are entertainers and not real politicians….

From Salon.com:

Poor Michele Bachmann! She’d been working the divisive culture warrior routine for years, to great success, when suddenly John McCain transforms a low-profile Alaska governor into the Queen of the Tea Parties. It’s enough to make anyone resentful. So it’s not too surprising that the Bachmann presidential campaign has begun its war with the Sarah Palin pseudo-campaign.

We live in a society that expects and sometimes demands that ambitious women battle each other for the limited number of slots available to them at the top of power structures, so the story of Bachmann “taking on” Palin would’ve been inevitable even if Bachmann strategist Ed Rollins hadn’t begun directly drawing contrasts between the two. (Yes, we also live in a society where Ed Rollins is working to get Michele Bachmann elected president and we just have to deal with that.)

The problem is, as Steve Kornacki explained, Bachmann’s campaign began gearing up when it looked like there was no chance of Palin entering the race. But Palin’s riding a bus across the country now for some reason, so Bachmann’s people need to make sure she remains a pseudo-candidate.

First, Rollins accused Palin of being unserious on talk radio yesterday, and he pointed out that Palin quit her job, while Bachmann is still an elected official. In an interview with Politico’s Ben Smith, Rollins laid out the Bachmann campaign’s official anti-Palin message: Bachmann is smarter than Palin but just as adorable:

Bachmann will “be so much more substantive,” Rollins said. “People are going to say, ‘I gotta make a choice and go with the intelligent woman who’s every bit as attractive.'” (See also: Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann size each other up)

“I’m not afraid of Palin,” he said, adding the strategy would have been the same for Mike Huckabee. (See also: Ed Rollins hops on Michele Bachmann bandwagon)

via Oh no, Bachmann and Palin are fighting – 2012 Elections – Salon.com.

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Heartless Hypocrite Eric Cantor Calls On Weiner To Resign

There are a lot of despicable politicians, but right now I can’t think of one worse than Eric Cantor, Republican Congressman of Virginia…

First he wants to destroy Medicaid and Medicare.

Then he only wants to help tornado victims in Missouri if he can cut money somewhere else in the budget.

Now, he’s jumping into the Anthony Weiner story and saying he should resign.

Funny, he didn’t say that about David Vitter or John Ensign.  But then, they were Republicans…

I don’t know how this man sleeps at night. Or how anyone sleeps with him….

He really should be left alone under a bridge like the troll he is…

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is now calling on Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign, in the wake of Weiner’s admission on Monday that he has engaged in online sexual exchanges with younger women, and that he had lied about the matter for the past week after accidentally posting a public Tweet, intended to have been a direct message to a college student, of a photo of his underwear-clad crotch.

“I don’t condone his activity. And I think he should resign,” Cantor said after a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Louisa, Virginia, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reports.

“We’ve got a lot of serious challenges in this country and a lot of work for Congress to do,” Cantor also added. “The last thing we need to do is get enmeshed in a discussion about Congressman Weiner and his Twitter activities.”

via Cantor Calls On Weiner To Resign | TPMDC.

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The GOP’s Dangerous Arrogance

Great article up at YahooNews…

Even I- no political innocent- am still shocked at how callous and blatantly Political the GOP is…

They really don’t seem to care about the Country, only about their political power and their wealthy campaign contributors.

Defaulting on the national debt is just unthinkable.  If they do not raise the debt ceiling, the entire economy will be thrown into chaos and Wall Street will go crazy.  I hope their Corporate owners force the Republicans to do the right thing, but I’m afraid they are too out of control right now even for the Wall Street moneymen to bring them into line.  This is scary stuff….

The Republicans have done everything they can to slow the recovery just so the economy will either collapse into crisis again or be so weak they can use it politically.

They have no interest in Statesmanship or in what is best for the Country.  All they care about is what is best for the GOP, the Rich and the Corporations who fund them…

I just hope the Rich and the Corporations still have enough control to stop the GOP from destroying the economy just for Political gain.  If they do play politics with the debt ceiling, even the Rich and the Corporations will feel the hurt.  But the Middle Class will feel it more.  As usual….

 

Nationally and globally, the economy is at a tipping point. The GOP, driven by invincible ignorance or cynical design – and perhaps both – is working overtime to trash the recovery with budget cuts that would drain demand from the economy – or a debt ceiling vote that could trigger a financial collapse equal to 2008, or perhaps unpredictably graver. For proof, all you had to do was listen to Mitt Romney’s announcement speech today. In it, he made a smarmy attempt to blame Barack Obama for the economic pain actually caused by the dereliction of duty by George W. Bush & Co., pain that was then prolonged by the obstruction of congressional Republicans. Those legislators contrived successfully to limit the stimulus package, block a second one, and forthwith blame the stimulus that saved us from another Great Depression for the slow climb out of the Great Recession. Never, of course, did they mention that the America’s deep deficits were generated by the fraudulent Bush war in Iraq and the unfair Bush tax cuts, which were founded on the false premise that they would pay for themselves.

The same tawdry spectacle has played out for two years and more in America’s capitol, a place that is still, despite recently fashionable worries about its destiny, the indispensible engine of the world economy. Indeed, the future of billions of human beings is determined by our elections, in which most of them have no vote. JFK once noted that the proudest boast of the ancient world was the boast of democratic citizenship: Civis Romanus sum: ‘I am a Roman citizen.’ The inescapable reality of the present world, for better or worse, is that people everywhere have to say, Civis Americanus sum. That’s strikingly clear here in Europe, in good times and bad. President Obama is a more popular, hope-giving figure than the leaders he recently visited; he’s the counterpoint to Bush and the redeemer of an American image carelessly disfigured during the first decade of the century.

And now the GOP that has moved decidedly to the right of Bush would compound his errors. Congressional Republicans could shatter the restored credibility of the United States by refusing to protect its full faith and credit by raising the national debt ceiling or by holding that essential measure hostage to the repeal of the New Deal – something that never even occurred to Ronald Reagan or either Bush president. In those Oval Offices, they regularly signed debt-ceiling increases.

via The GOP’s dangerous arrogance – Yahoo! News.

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House Republicans Propose Social Security Opt Out/Privatization

They really are coming out of the closet…

First they wanted to destroy Medicare and Medicaid…

Now, they want to destroy Social Security.

I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have Social Security than trust Wall Street to manage my retirement money.  And not everyone has the skills to manage their own investments.

I keep saying it:  Remove the earnings cap on Social Security contributions and we have no Social Security issues anymore.  It’s a small, easy fix and no one has to ever worry about Social Security being insolvent again.

But that’s not what the GOP wants.  They don’t want to save Social Security.  They  just want an excuse to kill it.

If the Democrats will just stand up to them and protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid- which is consistent with the Party’s core beliefs- they could take back the House and keep the Senate.  And the Presidency if the President will stand up also…

From The Hill:

House Republicans on Friday introduced legislation that would allow workers to partially opt out of Social Security immediately, and fully opt out after 15 years.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, and several other Republicans introduced the Savings Account for Every American (SAFE) Act. Under the bill, workers would immediately have 6.2 percent of their wages sent to a “SAFE” account each year.

That would take the place of the 6.2 percent the workers now contributed to Social Security.

Another 6.2% is sent to Social Security by employers. Under the Sessions bill, employers would continue to make this matching contribution to Social Security, but after 15 years, employers could also send that amount to the employee’s SAFE account.

Sessions said this transition to a private retirement savings option is needed because Social Security last year began paying out more money than it took in.

via House Republicans propose Social Security opt-out – The Hill’s Floor Action.

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The Next Bubble Is About to Burst: College Grads Face Dwindling Jobs and Mounting Loans

This has been a concern to me for some time….

So many kids are graduating college with so much debt- and no jobs.

And the Republicans want to cut education funding and Pell grants….

But then, the GOP has never valued education because educated people don’t vote Republican- unless they are rich and voting their pocketbook…

A scary little article from Alternet.com:

It’s the beginning of summer: warmer weather, longer days, the end of the school year. And that means graduation for thousands of young people across the U.S.; graduation with more student debt than ever before, and into a job market that is anything but promising.

Young people between the ages of 16 and 24 face an unemployment rate nearly twice that of the rest of the population, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. 2010’s 18.4 percent rate for youth was the worst in the 60 years that economists have collected such data. ColorLines notes that in 2010, 8.4 percent of white college graduates were unemployed, 13.8 percent of Latino graduates, and a dismal 19 percent of black graduates.

Those bright, shiny new degrees simply aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on all too often. The cost of a college degree is up some 3,400 percent since 1972, but as we all know too well, household incomes haven’t increased by anything close to that number — not for the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.

More:   The Next Bubble Is About to Burst: College Grads Face Dwindling Jobs and Mounting Loans | Economy | AlterNet.

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Sarah Palin On Paul Revere Ride: I Didn’t Get History Wrong

Uh, yes she did…

It’s so hard to post this without an outburst of profanity…

She was WRONG and she can’t even admit it.

Facts are facts and she doesn’t know hers.

She is an ignorant simpleton who wants all the media coverage she can get, but only on her own terms.

I can’t believe people take her seriously.  Her being accepted as a “legitimate” candidate for President of the United States is just ridiculous.  It makes the entire country look bad.

That sounds so much nicer than what I’m really thinking….

WASHINGTON (AP/The Huffington Post) — Sarah Palin says she didn’t mess up her history on Paul Revere.

The potential 2012 presidential candidate was in Boston on Thursday as part of her bus tour when she was asked about the Revolutionary War hero.

Palin said Revere “warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms.”

Palin, a paid Fox News contributor, told “Fox News Sunday” that she was correct. She says there were British soldiers in the area for years before Revere’s legendary ride, and that he was warning them, as well as his fellow colonists.

“Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there that ‘hey, you’re not going to take American arms, you are not going to beat our own well-armed persons individual private militia that we have.'”

She blamed her previous answer on the media, saying it was a “gotcha question.”

The Paul Revere House’s website says that on April 18, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren instructed Revere to ride to Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them.

via Sarah Palin On Paul Revere Ride: I Didn’t Get History Wrong (VIDEO).

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How Fraudulent Is the GOP Budget Plan? It Wouldn’t Even Make a Dent In the Deficit! | | AlterNet

Interesting article from Alternet.

Alternet has so much interesting information, but I just wish it were better, more tightly written.

Maybe it’s my old school journalism background, but while I love the content, the writing style on this site drives me crazy….

Anyway, this is some great information on just how bad the Ryan Republican Budget really is….

The Republican budget plan is the purest expression of the Right’s longstanding desire to dismantle the social safety net. It’s not about the budget deficit—that’s simply a premise — it’s the “Shock Doctrine” in action.

How radical is it? According to an analysis by the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the plan would slash all public spending other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by almost three-quarters by 2050. And because the “budget does not envision defense cuts in real terms,” what this means is that “most of the rest of the federal government outside of health care, Social Security, and defense would cease to exist.”

It’s the epitome of anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist’s fantasy of shrinking the government down to a point where he could “drown it in a bathtub.”

And it’s not just a matter of bait-and-switch; the entire proposal is a fraud. Just consider this: while selling their plan to the public as a “serious” and “bold” attempt to reduce the federal deficit, Republicans are overstating how much it would cut the budget gap by ten-fold.

via .

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GOP Can’t Handle The Truth: Taxes Are Lower Under Obama Than Reagan

Republicans don’t handle truth or facts well…

One of the things they did learn from Reagan was how to use smoke and mirrors and a little Hollywood magic to conceal the truth…

From ThinkProgress.org:

That House Republicans find this preposterous is symptomatic of the hold Reagan mythology has over them. After all, for seven of Reagan’s eight years in office, the top tax rate was higher than the current 35 percent. In six of those years, it was 50 percent or more. And every year that Regan was in office, the bottom tax bracket was higher than the current ten percent.

For a family of four, the “average income tax rate under Reagan in 1983 was 11.06 percent. Under Clinton in 1992, it was 9.18 percent. And under Obama in 2010, it was 4.68 percent.” During Reagan’s time, income tax revenue ranged from 7.8 to 9.4 percent of GDP. Last year, it was 6.2 percent and is not projected to climb back to 9 percent until 2016. In fact, in 2009, Americans paid their lowest taxes in 60 years.

Republicans are very fond of saying that the U.S. has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” But the truth is that revenue has plunged due to the recession and to continued misguided tax cuts, and revenue needs to be raised to eventually bring the budget into balance. And Reagan knew that taxes were an important part of the budget equation. After all, he “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years.

via GOP Can’t Handle The Truth: Taxes Are Lower Under Obama Than Reagan | ThinkProgress.

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Poll: GOP Medicare-Ending Budget Bigger Political Fumble Than First Thought

Like I’ve said, the Democrats are known for shooting themselves in the foot. But luckily the GOP just shot themselves in the head….

From TalkingPointsMemo.com:

It doesn’t take much political savvy to note that Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare-destroying budget plan hasn’t panned out all that well for the GOP. But a new poll out from advocates for the Democratic health care law shows that the Ryan budget fail goes even deeper than embarrassed presidential candidates and special election upsets.

Not only does the poll show huge opposition to Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with a voucher system, the poll shows Democrats winning the credibility war when it comes to Medicare and “protecting the middle class.” And — in a jolt of good news for the White House and Democrats — the numbers show that when voters are given Ryan budget messaging from opponents, support for the Democratic health care law actually goes up slightly in response.

I’ve seen the same types of responses in several other polls today…..

Now, if the Dems just don’t cave in during the negotiations over the debt ceiling, they have a-  probably the- winning issue for the 2012 elections.

And the GOP has got to agree to increase the debt ceiling or Wall Street-who owns most of the government-  will have a nervous breakdown.

They really have no bargaining legs to stand on….

But that’s not stopped the Dems from caving in the past…

via Poll: GOP Medicare-Ending Budget Bigger Political Fumble Than First Thought | TPMDC.

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